Sponsored by the CIC Materials Chemistry Division
The Award for Research Excellence in Materials Chemistry is presented to a Canadian citizen or landed immigrant who has made an outstanding contribution to materials chemistry while working in Canada.
View the Terms of Reference and list of Past Winners
The 2021 winner of the Award for Research Excellence in Materials Chemistry is:
Venkataraman Thangadurai, MCIC
University of Calgary 
Dr. Venkataraman Thangadurai is a professor of chemistry at the University of Calgary. After receiving his PhD in 1999 from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, he conducted his postdoctoral research at the University of Kiel, Germany, with a prestigious fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Bonn. In 2004, he received the Habilitation degree from the University of Kiel.
Dr. Thangadurai has been tirelessly pushing scientific boundaries to advance the field of alternative energy generation and storage. His research focuses on the design, synthesis and characterization of novel solid-state electrolytes and electrodes for next generation solid-state batteries, solid oxide fuel cells, and gas sensors. He has 200+ publications (h-index 55), which have been cited over 13,000 times.
Amongst the many awards/honors earned by him, Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (UK), Keith Laidler Award (Canadian Society of Chemistry), Fellow of the Electrochemical Society (USA), Peak Scholar (UCalgary), and Parex Innovation Fellow (Faculty of Science, UCalgary) are most notable. He is a Co-founder and Scientific Advisor of Ion Storage Systems, Maryland, USA. He was recently appointed as a Scientist and Mentor at the Creative Destruction Lab – Rockies, a non-profit organization that offers programming to enhance the success of massively scalable, seed-stage science- and technology-based companies.
Group website
Research gate
Google Scholar